Foreign data wrappers can use this capability for so-called "join
pushdown"; that is, instead of executing two separate foreign scans
and then joining the results locally, they can generate a path which
performs the join on the remote server and then is scanned locally.
This commit does not extend postgres_fdw to take advantage of this
capability; it just provides the infrastructure.
Custom scan providers can use this in a similar way. Previously,
it was only possible for a custom scan provider to scan a single
relation. Now, it can scan an entire join tree, provided of course
that it knows how to produce the same results that the join would
have produced if executed normally.
KaiGai Kohei, reviewed by Shigeru Hanada, Ashutosh Bapat, and me.
This allows extension modules to define their own methods for
scanning a relation, and get the core code to use them. It's
unclear as yet how much use this capability will find, but we
won't find out if we never commit it.
KaiGai Kohei, reviewed at various times and in various levels
of detail by Shigeru Hanada, Tom Lane, Andres Freund, Álvaro
Herrera, and myself.
Robert Haas
Bruce Momjian